in what is burning him." Dante told him, that he had already guessed as much; and pointing to one of them in particular, asked who was in that fire, which was divided at top, as though it had ascended from the funeral-pile of the hating Theban brothers. " Within that," answered Virgil, are Diomed and Ulysses; who speed together now to their own misery, as they used to do to that of others." They were suffering the penalty of the various frauds they had perpetrated in concert; such as the contrivance of the Trojan horse, and the plunder of the Palladium. Dante entreats with the greatest earnestness, that if those who are within the sparkling horror can speak, it may be made to come near. Virgil says it shall; but begs the Florentine not to question it himself; as the spirits, being Greek, might be shy of holding discourse with him. When the flame has come near enough to be spoken to, Virgil addresses the "two within one fire ;" and requests them, if he ever deserved any thing of them as a poet, great or little, that they would not go away, till one of them had told him how he came into that extremity,

At this, says Dante, the greater horn of the old fire began to lap hither and thither, murmuring; like a flame struggling with the wind. The top then, yearning to and fro, like a tongue trying to speak, threw out a voice, and said: "When I departed from Circe, who withdrew me to her for more than a year in the neighbourhood of Gaieta, before Æneas had so named it; neither the sweet company of my son, nor pious affection of my old father, nor the long-owed love with which I ought to have gladdened Penelope, could conquer the ardour that was in me to become wise in knowledge of the world, of man's vices and his virtue. I put forth into the great open deep with only one bark, and the small remaining crew by whom I had not been left. I saw the two shores on either side, as far as Spain and Morocco; and the island of Sardinia, and the other isles which the sea there bathes round about. Slowly we went, my companions and I, for we were old; till at last we came to that narrow outlet, where Hercules set up his pillars, that no man might go further. I left Seville on the right hand: on the other I had left Ceuta. O brothers, said I, who through a hundred thousand perils are at length arrived at the west, deny not to the short waking day that yet remains to our senses, an insight into the unpeopled world, setting your backs upon the sun. Consider the stock from which ye sprang: ye were not made to live like the brute beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge. I so sharpened my companions with this little speech on our way, that it would have been difficult for me to have withheld them, if I would. We left the morning right in our stern, and made wing's of our oars for the idle flight, always gaining upon the left. The night now beheld all the stars of the other pole; while our own was so low, that it arose not out of the ocean-floor. Five times the light had risen underneath the moon, and five times fallen, since we put forth upon the great deep; when we descried a dim mountain in the distance, which appeared higher to me than ever I had seen any before. We rejoiced, and as soon mourned: for there sprung a whirlwind

from the new land, and struck the foremost frame of our vessel. Three times, with all the waters, it whirled us round; at the fourth it dashed the stern up in air, and the prow downwards; till, as seemed fit to others, the ocean closed above our heads."

Tre volte il fè girar con tutte l' acque :

A la quarta levar la poppa in suso,

E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque,
Infin ch 'l mar fu sopra noi richiuso.

Why poor Ulysses should find himself in hell after his immersion, and be condemned to a swathing of eternal fire, while St. Dominic, who deluged Christianity with fire and blood, is called a Cherubic Light, the Papist, not the poet, must explain. He puts all the Pagans in hell, because however good some of them may have been, they lived before Christ, and could not worship God properly-(debitaI mente). But he laments their state, and represents them as suffering a mitigated punishment: they only live in a state of perpetual desire without hope (sol di tanto offesi)! A sufficing misery, it must be allowed; but compared with the horrors he fancies for heretics and others, undoubtedly a great relief. Dante, throughout his extraordinary work, gives many evidences of great natural sensibility; and his countenance, as handed down to us, as well as the shadestruck gravity of his poetry in general, shews the cuts and disquietudes of heart he must have endured. But unless the occasional hell of his own troubles, and his conciousness of the mutability of all things, helped him to discover the brevity of individual suffering as a particular, and the lastingness of nature's benevolence as an universal; and thus gave his poem an intention beyond what appears upon the surface; we must conclude, that a bigoted education, and the fierce party politics in which he was a leader and sufferer, obscured the kind greatness of his spirit. It is always to be recollected however, as Mr. Coleridge has observed somewhere in other words, that when men consign each other to eternal punishment and such like horrors, their belief is rather a venting of present impatience and dislike, than any thing which they take it for. The fiercest Papist or Calvinist only flatters himself (a strange flattery too!) that he could behold a fellow creature tumbling and shrieking about in eternal fire. He would begin shrieking himself in a few minutes; and think that he and all heaven ought to pass away, rather than that one such agony should continue. Tertullian himself, when he longed to behold the enemies of his faith burning and liquefying, only meant, without knowing it, that he was in an excessive rage at not convincing every body that read him. Yet, in the mean time, these notions disturb humanity, and degrade the Divine Spirit.

FAR COUNTRIES.

Imagination, though no mean thing, is not a proud one. If it looks down from its wings upon common-places, it only the more perceives the vastness of the region about it. The infinity into

which it's flight carries it, might indeed throw back upon it a too great sense of insignificance, did not Beauty or Moral Justice, with it's equal eye, look through that blank aspect of power, and reassure it; shewing it that there is a power as much above power itself, as the thought that reaches to all, is to the hand that can touch only thus far.

But we do not wish to get into this tempting region of speculation, just now. We only intend to shew the particular instance, in which imagination instinctively displays it's natural humility: we mean, in the fondness which imaginative times and people have shewn for what is personally remote from them; for what is opposed to their own individual consciousness, even in range of space, in farness of situation.

There is no surer mark of a vain people than their treating other nations with contempt, especially those of whom they know least. It is better to verify the proverb, and take every thing unknown for magnificent, rather than predetermine it to be worthless. The gain is greater. The instinct is more judicious. When we mention the French as an instance, we do not mean to be invidious. Most nations have their good as well as bad features; and in Vanity Fair there are many booths.

The French, not long ago, praised one of their neighbours so highly, that the latter is suspected to have lost as much modesty, as the former gained by it. But they did this as a set-off against their own despots and bigots. When they again became the greatest power in Europe, they had a relapse of their old egotism. The French, though an amiable and intelligent people, are not an imagiginative one. The greatest height they go is in a balloon They get no farther than France, let them go where they will. They the great circle and are still at home," like the squirrel in his rolling cage. Instead of going to Nature in their poetry, they would make her come to them, and dress herself at their last new toilet. In practical philosophy and metaphysics, they divest themselves of gross prejudices, and then think they are in as graceful a state of nakedness as Adam and Eve.

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At the time when the French had this fit upon them of praising the English (which was nevertheless the honester one of the two), they took to praising the Chinese for numberless unknown qualities. This seems a contradiction to the near-sightedness we speak of: but the reason they praised them was, that the Chinese had the merit of unbounded religious toleration; a great and extraordinary one certainly, and not the less so, for having been, to all appearance, the work of one man. All the romance of China, such as it was, any thing in which they differed from the French, their dress, their porcelain towers, their Great Wall,-was nothing. It was the particular agreement with the philosophers.

It happened curiously enough, that they could not have selected for their panegyric a nation apparently more contemptuous of others; or at least more self-satisfied and unimagnative. The Chinese are cunning and ingenious; and have a great talent at bowing out am

bassadors who come to visit them. But it is somewhat inconsistent with what appears to be their general character, that they should pay strangers even this equivocal compliment; for under a prodigious mask of politeness, they are not slow to evince their contempt of other nations, whenever any comparison is insinuated with the subjects of the Brother of the Sun and Moon. The knowledge they respect in us most, is that of gun-making, and of the East Indian passage. When our countrymen shewed them a map of the earth, they enquired for China; and on finding that it only made a little piece in a corner, could not contain their derision. They thought that it was the main territory in the middle, the apple of the world's eye.

On the other hand, the most imaginative nations, in their highest times, have had a respect for remote countries. It is a mistake to suppose that the ancient term barbarian, applied to foreigners, suggested the meaning we are apt to give it. It may have gathered some such insolence with it among the Romans, as they spread their own barbarous power; but the more intellectual Greeks venerated the countries from which they brought the elements for their mythology and philosophy. The philosopher travelled into Egypt, like a son to see his father. The merchant heard in Phoenicia the farbrought stories of other realms, which he told to his delighted countrymen. It is supposed, that the mortal part of Mentor in the Odyssey was drawn from one of these voyagers. When Anacharsis the Scythian was reproached with his native place by an unworthy Greek, he said, "My country may be a shame to me, but you are a shame to your country." Greece had a lofty notion of the Persians and the Great King, till Xerxes came over to teach it better, and betrayed the softness of their skulls.

It was the same with the Arabians, at the time when they had the chief accomplishments of the world to themselves; as we see by their delightful tales. Every thing shines with them in the distance, like a sunset. What an amiable people are their Persians! What a wonderful place is the island of Serindib! You would think nothing could be finer than the Caliph's city of Bagdat, till you hear of Grand Cairo; and how has that epithet and that name towered in the imagination of all those, who have not had the misfortune to see the modern city! Sindbad was respected, like Ulysses, because he had seen so many adventures and nations. So was Aboulfaouris the Great Voyager, in the Persian Tales. His very name sounds like a wonder.

With many a tempest had his beard been shaken.

It was one of the workings of the great Alfred's mind, to know about far-distant countries. There is a translation by him of a book of geography; and he even employed people to travel; a great stretch of intellectual munificence for those times. About the same period, Haroun al Raschid (whom our manhood is startled to find almost a less real person than we thought him, for his very reality) wrote a letter to the Emperor of the West, Charlemagne. Here is Arabian and Italian romance, shaking hands in person!

We do not

The Crusades pierced into a new world of remoteness. know whether those were much benefited, who took part in them; but for the imaginative persons remaining at home, the idea of going to Palestine must have been like travelliug into a supernatural world. When the compaign itself had a good effect, it must have been of a very fine and highly-tempered description. Chaucer's Knight had been

Sometime with the lord of Palatiee
Agen another hethen in Turkie:

And evermore he had a sovereign price;

And though that he was worthy, he was wise,
And of his port as meek as is a inayde.

How like a return from the moon must have been the reappearance of such travellers as Sir John Mandevile, Marco Polo, and William de Rubruquis, with their news of Prester John, the Great Mogul, and the Great Cham of Tartary! The long-lost voyager must have been like a person consecrated in all the quarters of heaven. His staff and his beard must have looked like relics of his former self. The Venetians, who were some of the earliest European travellers, have been remarked, among their other amiable qualities, for their great respect for strangers. The peculiarity of their position, and the absence of so many things which are common-places to other countries, such as streets, horses, and coaches, add, no doubt, to this feeling. But a foolish or vain people would only feel a contempt for what they did not possess. Milton, in one of those favourite passages of his, in which he turns a mere vocabulary into such grand meaning and music, shews us whose old footing he had delighted to follow. How he enjoys the distance; emphatically using the words far, farthest, and utmost!

Embassies from regions far remote,

In various habits, on the Appian road,

Or on the Emilian; some from farthest south,
Syene, and where the shadow both way falls,

Meroe, Nilotick isle; and more to west,

The realm of Bocchus to the Black-moor sea ;

From the Asian kings, and Parthian among these;
From India and the golden Chersonese,

And utmost Indian isle Taprobane.-Parad. Reg. B. 4.

One of the main helps to our love of remoteness in general, is the associations we connect with it of peace and quietness. Whatever there may be at a distance, people feel as if they should escape from the worry of their local cares. "O that I had wings like a dove! then would I fly away and be at rest." The word far is often used wilfully in poetry, to render distance still more distant. An old English song begins

In Irelande farre over the sea

There dwelt a bonny king.

Thomson, a Scotchman, speaking of the western isles of his own
country, has that delicious line, full of a dreary yet lulling pleasure :-
As when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main.